for each job, which depend in turn on the minimum standards and the aptitude distribution desired.

Whether their quality goals are realistic and necessary, as the Services maintain, or too high, as Congress often claims, has been difficult to ascertain. One of the major weaknesses of DoD's position is that quality requirements have been related to the aptitude of recruits rather than to realized on-the-job performance. That is, the discussion has been cast in terms of scores on the AFQT—Service X needs this level of funding in order to attract so many recruits in Categories I through IIIA—without being able to show empirically what this ability distribution means in terms of performance gains. The AFQT categories do not denote levels of job mastery and, indeed, the link from recruit quality to job performance has been largely unknown.

In the economic climate of the 1980s, the old “more is better” way of doing business was no longer credible. As the decade progressed, Congress became increasingly insistent in asking: How much quality is enough? DoD launched the Joint-Service Job Performance Measurement/Enlistment Standards Project to provide the data base and the methodologies necessary to provide more explicit, scientifically defensible answers to that question.